I was thinking last night about how strange our money system is. Or any money system, for that matter.
This month I accidentally made two student loan payments instead of two. Unfortunately, I only had enough money in my checking account for one payment, so on Monday (when the second payment went through) I wound up having a negative balance. I tranferred money from my savings account to cover the shortfall. There’s more I won’t explain, but the upshot is that next month I will be transferring money among my savings account, my checking account, and my student loans to straighten things out.
It’s strange that so many of our economic transactions today are electronic. Electrical pulses zipping around the world over wires. Debit cards, credit cards, online payments. My salary is paid by direct deposit, so I don’t even see a check. You have money, but how much of it do you actually see anymore? Only your cash.
And cash – at least paper money – is only that, paper. The only reason it’s worth something is because we all agree that it does.
The only real money, some say, is gold. There was a great New York Times Magazine article a few months ago about “gold bugs,” people who are fetishistic about the value and reliability of gold. But what is gold, after all, but a rare, shiny metal? It has no magical properties. You can’t eat it. Wood and steel are good enough for shelter, and fabric is good enough for clothes.
Gold, like paper and the electronic impulse, has no value for what it is but for what it does. From the above article: “As the greatest theorist of money, the German sociologist Georg Simmel, recognized, money is only money when it is in motion: ‘When money stands still, it is no longer money according to its specific value and significance.'” One of the themes of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle and Cryptonomicon is money and how it has evolved from gold to information and electronic data.
It’s so odd that you can have “millions of dollars in the bank” and feel safe, when what “millions of dollars in the bank” really means is that you can see a big number on a computer screen, made of pixels. “Millions of dollars in the bank” is nothing but a promise. And yet it’s the biggest thing in the world.
(Not that I have millions of dollars, mind you. But one can dream.)
Wow! I’d cognized that concept! I always say, “Money’s only money the moment you spend it,” or “Money’s not a noun, it’s a verb.”
Who knew – I wasn’t actually kidding!
I have similar thoughts about money. I try to avoid them. Otherwise the entire structure starts to seem shaky, once you realize that “value” is some agreed-upon phenom that is only marginally tied to real life.
Basically, money’s just something we use to exchange for items or a service. In future, it could be that when a person is born, he/she automatically gets a life bank account and an electronic card is used where the money you have is just those digits on the tiny screen on the card. So you start off with zero dollars until your parents transfer an amount from theirs to yours (pocket money, maybe)
Say you lend a person money, you just send the amount over to his/her card, and the amount on his/her card increases.
Need to buy anything? Just scan card and everything’s paid (providing there’s sufficient amount in the card)
Savings account…. not that is a bizarre concept!
Money is a token. Its like a rose. Its value depends on relationships.
The money metaphore is a real problem for culture and civilisation if we do not recognise that relationships make ‘money’ work.